Wampeters, Foma and Granfaloons
Indianapolis is never far from my mind, especially in recent weeks with the hosting of the NBA All-Star Game. The first time the Circle City has hosted it since 1985. When it was announced in 2016 that it would host the game in 2021, I wondered if I’d be able to go to the weekend events as press via my newspaper job. COVID pushed back the Indy date to this year. All for the best; back then, the focus would have been Domantas Sabonis. A talented player, to be sure, but not with the same level of charisma as Tyrese Haliburton. Fitting because the two were traded for each other.
If we’re being technical, Indianapolis is not my hometown. That honor belongs to Maywood, Illinois. It is nice to have a common place of origin as Chairman Fred Hampton and John Prine, but I don’t feel the connection there that I do to my adopted hometown.
La Porte made me a Region Rat, a term for those dwelling in the northwestern part of the state. Culturally, they are closer to Chicago than Indianapolis. Some of them serve as bedroom communities for the Second City. In the manner that parts of Jersey and Connecticut fill that role for NYC.
The people there root for the Bears, the Blackhawks, the Cubs, the White Sox, and The Bulls. I started my basketball fandom as a Bulls fan because of Michael Jordan. That’s all I knew, and that’s who my front-running father rooted for. He was a 49ers fan; maybe that’s because they were closest to Idaho, where he grew up, or perhaps it was that they were enjoying a period of success.
He was a Cubs fan because his father was a Cubs fan, which is why I am a Cubs fan. I assume that my grandfather heard their games on his radio. It's not like many teams then; he was born in 1918.
My dad once went to a Bulls game; I thought he might be taking me. He did not. But my mom rectified that during her first year of law school when she took me to my first NBA game: Bulls/Pacers.
I didn’t even know the Pacers were a team until I moved to Kokomo in 1995. That’s when I really started to become a Hoosier culturally. I was aware of the Purdue University/Indiana University divide to some extent and might have owned a Hoosiers jacket around then. Red is my favorite color, so I already felt the pull of the cream and crimson.
The same season my mom took me to my first game, the three of us watched the NBA Playoffs together. We watched Games 6 and 7 of the 1998 Eastern Conference Finals. I remember wishing at the time for a way for both teams to move on.
After Jordan retired, my interest in hoops waned some. When the Pacers made the 2000 NBA Finals, I was happy for them and wanted them to win. In the wilderness years, I didn’t pay much attention to basketball like I had when I was younger. The knowledge of my younger years was limited in capacity, gathered from what I knew about players on cereal boxes, in advertisements, and in movies.
When the Brawl happened during my sophomore year, it felt like the end of basketball for me. It lay dormant as an interest until my college years, when the resurgence of IU as a competitive program drew my interest.
I was there for the bad times when IU was playing a guy I went to high school with. He had some talent, but not the kind that takes you to the NBA. I felt most homesick in grad school when Christian Watford hit a buzzer-beater that upset the University of Kentucky Wildcats. I thought of all the celebrating my friends were doing, the state of chaos of Kirkwood Avenue, and my ache for a time and place to which I could never return.
I watched Parks & Recreation to soothe that loneliness. I was so tickled by Roy Hibbert's appearance on the show that I decided it was time to dive back into the NBA.
I’ve been in a bad state about the Pacers for over a decade and wouldn’t have it any other way. Sometimes, the state of the team is so dire that it makes me want to get myself a Flagrant 2 in the game of life.
But other times, they’re there just when I need them most. In their first game of 2019, the Pacers played the Bulls, and it was Victor Oladipo, whose time at IU overlapped with mine, and Myles Turner, my long-time favorite Pacer, who helped seal the win. It was my first Pacers game without my mom and it felt like they won it just for me.
The players and the teams involved felt significant, just as it did last season when the Pacers played the Lakers in LA on the 25th anniversary of my first game. Andrew Nembhard stunned the Lakers with a buzzer-beating three, facing me from the opposite corner of the basket I was sitting near.
It felt significant to have those experiences and also a little unreal.
Shortly before my mother died, they painted a mural of Reggie Miller on the side of the building where her law office was once located. Several promotional videos and photos for the All-Star Game made use of that mural, and it was on my mind then.
The other mural I had on my mind was that of Kurt Vonnegut on Massachusetts Avenue. The Vonnegut has been around longer than the Reggie mural but was painted by the same artist, Pamela Bliss.
I often think of my adopted home state because of this quote from Cat’s Cradle. “I don't know what it is about Hoosiers. But wherever you go there is always a Hoosier doing something very important there.” That’s an example of what Vonnegut called a granfalloon: people linked by something in common whose association is ultimately meaningless.
I like it because if I’m living or visiting somewhere new, finding a tie to Indiana or something of equal importance to my sense of self grounds me. I suppose that’s related to all the moving I did as a kid and my father leaving at an early age. I need something to make me feel I belong.
Maybe it’s also to do with growing up in a town sometimes referred to as Indiana-no-place. It’s dismissed as flyover country, a place that must be escaped. I take pride in finding Hoosiers everywhere because it means you don’t have to come from the coast or a big town to have an impact on the world.
“All my jokes are Indianapolis. All my attitudes are Indianapolis. My adenoids are Indianapolis. If I ever severed myself from Indianapolis, I would be out of business. What people like about me is Indianapolis,” Vonnegut said to a high school audience in 1986.
I feel much the same way. My values are midwestern values by way of Brooklyn. My mom came to embrace living in the Midwest; she abandoned her hometown sports teams in favor of cheering on our locals. If it was Knicks/Pacers, she was fully behind the blue and gold.
She took my brother and me to Peyton Manning’s first NFL game. They played the Miami Dolphins, and Dan Marino was still QB-ing for them. She called him Danny Boy. I think she liked him because he was Italian. My mom was a Dolphins fan, which I suppose came from the New York Jets playing in the same division as them. She also had an interest in marine biology at one point.
Going into high school, I was aware of the name Vonnegut. I hadn’t seen Back To School, but I was aware that he had a cameo in it. I heard him talk up as a local author; I figured it was like a James Whitcomb Riley thing where he was a local figure whose stature and reputation were inflated for being a hometown hero. I was disabused of those notions about Vonnegut very quickly.
And that’s unfair to Riley, a talented writer who was one of the most famous writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and whose poems “Little Orphant Annie” and “The Raggedy Man” inspired Little Orphan Annie and Raggedy Ann.
The first Vonnegut I ever read was Cat’s Cradle. A friend and classmate lent it to me. And it proved to be a life-changing book. And I explored more of Vonnegut’s body of work as my high school career went on.
That friend also brought me on to the Brain Game team, a quiz bowl competition for Indiana high school students. For our matches, we’d travel to Butler University's campus to film episodes broadcast on the local NBC affiliate.
The coach of that team was Mark Myers and the coolest teacher I ever had in high school. He wore a stud earring in one ear, and you could talk to him about anything from Henry David Thoreau to Keith Richards to Universal Horror films.
In my piece on the Kinks, he was the teacher who gifted me Aftermath. After I shared that piece with the teacher who gave me The Kinks albums, he told me that Mr. Myers had passed away in December. I was crushed to hear that because he was such a kind, warm, and funny guy. And an excellent educator! I learned so much from him and my Latin teacher, Nancy Wilson.
Along with covering what was in the syllabus, they believed in enriching our cultural understanding. Mrs. Wilson screened the film version of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum for us so we could see a modern version of Roman comedic plays and expose us to Stephen Sondheim. She gave up a Saturday to give us a practice exam for AP Latin - Virgil, and while we were working on the exam, she prepared the Canadian version of French Toast that her stepfather had made for her growing up.
She was a teacher who cared about us, saw our potential, and did all she could to set us up for success in college so we’d avoid some of the pitfalls she had early on in her college career.
Mr. Myers was the same way. I had him for a class my senior year called Science & Ethics. We met for two periods and read science fiction, philosophy, and scientific papers. We discussed complex issues, ones that had no easy answers. He screened scenes from UHF and showed us all of Duck Soup because he felt it was essential to our well-rounded individuals.
One moment I regretted with him came during a Brain Game practice. The question was about Jimmy Carter, who I referred to as “history’s greatest monster,” a nod to the classic Simpsons line. I don’t believe he remembered that line, and it upset him. I wish I could have explained then and apologized for that. He was a very progressive guy, an excellent role model to have in a state as red as Indiana and a time as conservative as the Bush years.
What I remember most about him is how he listened attentively and respectfully when I talked about music. I’m sure he already knew everything I told him, like Rubber Soul influencing Pet Sounds, but he never let on if he did. I think he appreciated my enthusiasm. It was so very kind of him. He also loved more contemporary music, and in his message in my senior book, he encouraged me to enjoy the music of my day, which I think is as valuable a lesson as anyone could have.
He loved playing guitar and the blues and showcased that at coffeehouse nights that he helped organize. It was a beautiful support for budding musicians, poets, and writers. I never performed, but I attended a few of the events. No matter what your clique or social group, we all agreed that Mr. Myers was cool.
When I visited him after I’d graduated, we talked about many of the same topics we had before and me with greater depth and knowledge. He continued to share his interests with us. He showed us a clip of the blind man scene in The Bride of Frankenstein and the parody in Young Frankenstein.
But what I’ll remember most about Mr. Myers was his love of Kurt Vonnegut. We were both devastated when he passed away. We had both hoped to attend his lecture at Butler, but he passed away roughly two weeks before it happened. I had to bow out before then, as it was the opening night of my final high school theatrical production, Nunsense, and I had a significant part in it: Sister Julia, Child of God.
During rehearsals for that or A Servant of Two Masters, I read Slaughterhouse-Five while waiting in the wings. There, I read the passage about the bombs going in reverse. That remains one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I’ve ever read. Just the sentiment of removing pain, hate, and destruction from the world. It resonated with me then and more now, especially with my experience living with PTSD. I understood why the narration was jumbled and why poor Billy Pilgrim’s sense of time got so rearranged.
“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-weet?’” — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
Vonnegut was a secular humanist, and his belief in the value of every human being is reflected in his books, which lack the traditional villains found in other literature. And why it’s no surprise he was honored by the Eugene V. Debs Foundation.
His memorial service was at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Museum, which ended fittingly with this Vonnegut quote: “So it goes.”
I reconnected with Mr. Myers two years ago, not long after I moved to California. We caught up a little, and I had a chance to thank him for all he had given me and what his teaching meant. I’m glad I did because life is so short, and the love expressed at a funeral should be shared while the person is still there to appreciate it. At times, we all need reminders that we matter, that our words and actions have meaning, and that we positively impact those whose paths we cross.
God Bless you, Mr. Myers.